Category: video games

Castaway

~ Kathryn ~ 2 Comments

Castaway is a tribute to Link’s Awakening whose story campaign takes about 35 minutes to play. This campaign functions as a tutorial to the game’s Death Tower, in which you have one life to climb fifty simple and static floors with very few health drops and no permanent upgrades. The Death Tower is not for me, but the story campaign was a pocket of pure and unadulterated joy.

You play as a young boy whose escape pod lands on a deserted island after his spaceship blows up. After the crash, pterodactyls steal the boy’s survival tools and his dog, so it’s up to him to unsheathe his trusty sword and explore the island to get everything back.

The island is very small, as are each of the three dungeons. There’s no one to talk to, and there are only four types of enemies. The only aspects of the environment you can interact with are two types of rocks, so all of the puzzles involve sokoban-style block pushing. The two tools you find in the first two dungeons are a pickaxe that allows you to break rocks and a hookshot that allows you to latch onto rocks to cross gaps. If you use your tools to backtrack, you can collect three additional hearts to bolster your health.

The overworld map and dungeons are all tight and precise. More than a true imitation of a Zelda game, Castaway’s story campaign seems to be a stage for speedrunning, and there’s a special Speedrun Mode that allows you to see the clock onscreen. I tend not to care about such things, but the Speedrun Mode was a nice excuse to give the game a second playthrough with a bit more challenge.

The music and sound effects of Castaway are forgettable, but the graphics manage to achieve the trick of using modern technology to reproduce what you thought Game Boy Color games looked like when you were younger. The pixel art of the opening and closing animations is gorgeous, and the interstitial illustrations are lovely as well.

Whether this tiny game is worth $8 is debatable, especially if you’re not interested in speedruns or gauntlet survival challenges. I love Link’s Awakening beyond all reason, so I was happy to put down the money to support indie developers while spending an hour in nostalgia heaven. Still, it would have been nice if Castaway had more substance.

If you’re interested in the concept of Castaway but don’t want to spend money on something that feels like it should be a free demo of a larger game, please consider the alternative of Ocean’s Heart, a beautiful and robust Zeldalike game that’s honestly better than most actual Zelda games. If you’re interested, you can check out my review of Ocean’s Heart (here).

Animal Well

~ Kathryn ~ Leave a comment

Animal Well is a no-combat puzzle platformer with an open-world Metroidvania structure. You play as a small seed navigating a mossy system of underground tunnels. The game has no dialogue or diegetic text, nor does it need any. Your job is simply to explore.

Because this is a video game, however, the player needs objectives. Early on in the game, the little seed arrives in what appears to be a central hub with statues of four animals. Each animal’s flame is sealed in a themed quadrant of the map. Although your map is mostly blank at the beginning, the location of each flame is marked, giving you four goals to work toward. Navigation is anything but simple, however, and figuring out where you’re supposed to go is just as much of a puzzle as any of the one-room set pieces.

Since Animal Well gives you so many paths to choose from, the beginning can be confusing. In many ways, this game reminds me of Hollow Knight and Hyper Light Drifter, which are similarly cagey about where the critical path might lie. Thankfully, there’s no wrong way to play Animal Well, so you’ll be fine if you simply choose a direction and start walking. Once you make your way into a level proper, the path forward becomes much easier to follow.  

As you might guess from the title, the vast underground well that serves as the setting of the game is filled with animals that theme the puzzles. In the dog level, for example, you’ll need to find a frisbee that you can throw to distract the dogs that chase after you. In the seahorse level, fish blow bubbles into the air that you can use to reach higher platforms. In the chameleon level, you’ll need to adjust the path of wall-climbing hedgehogs so that they hit otherwise inaccessible switches.

Animal Well offers the player a beautiful and evocative environment to get lost in, and it’s nice to see such a well-designed game that focuses on exploration instead of combat. Most of the platforming puzzles are relatively easy but still very clever, which I appreciate. The pixel art is gorgeous and atmospheric, and each area manages to express its theme while still maintaining a unified aesthetic that ties the various ecosystems together. There’s not much music, but the sound design is fantastic.   

If I have one complaint about Animal Well, it’s that the map is riddled with secret passageways that are completely unmarked. In addition, you can only make it so far into each level without the aid of a tool from another level. In theory, this means that there are eight levels instead of four. In practice, it can be frustrating not to know whether you can’t proceed because you need a tool from a different level or whether you simply missed a hidden path. Unless you happen to be either very good (or very patient) with this sort of thing, I’d strongly recommend playing Animal Well with a walkthrough.

It’s impossible to say how long Animal Well takes to play. According to reviews, it has the potential to be a five-hour game, but I get the feeling that the majority of players aren’t going to have such a smooth experience. If I had to guess, I’d say that most first-time players should expect to spend at least six or seven hours getting to the end. After that, there’s potentially another ten hours of exploration enabled by the tools you find at the end of the final area.

Is the cleverness and charm of Animal Well worth the aggravation of getting lost and not knowing what you’re supposed to do? That depends on the player, of course, and it’s worth saying that this isn’t a casual game. Still, although I wish Animal Well were less opaque, I appreciate that it’s not actually difficult. Exploration is always rewarded, and I never stopped being surprised and amazed by each new bit of the game I managed to find. Every single screen in Animal Well is a work of art.

After finishing Animal Well, I read the TV Tropes page to see if there’s an actual story to the game. Perhaps you can unlock a different ending if you can manage to find all the collectables? From what I can tell, there’s no real story no matter what you do, but there are collectables underneath collectables underneath collectables. There’s also an ARG. None of that is any of my business, but it’s cool I guess. I always appreciate when the people who created a game were living their best lives, and I’m happy to have an excuse to spend more time poking around the beautiful mossy tunnels of Animal Well. 

Mr. Saitou

~ Kathryn ~ Leave a comment

Mr. Saitou is an Undertale-style narrative adventure game (with music by Toby Fox) that takes about two hours to finish. You play as Saitou, a white-collar worker who finds himself in the hospital after a failed suicide attempt triggered by stress and overwork. While sleeping, Saitou dreams of himself as a llamaworm (a comically extended groundhog) who goes on an adventure with a cute pink flowerbud named Brandon, the dream persona of a young child Saitou meets in the hospital.

Mr. Saitou has something of slow start, during which the player’s sole job is mashing a button to advance text. Thankfully, the game becomes much more engaging after the first ten minutes, at which point Saitou enters the dream world.

After the introduction, Saitou spends about half an hour in an office of llamaworms that serves as a stage for a gentle comedy about workplace culture. After a ten-minute segment of mandatory afterwork socialization in an izakaya, Saitou returns home to his neighborhood of underground tunnels.

Saitou decides to skip work the next day. This gives him an opportunity to meet Bradon, who wants to visit the Flooded Gem Caverns deeper in the tunnels. The remainder of Mr. Saitou unfolds in a beautiful fantasy-themed underground space enhanced by lowkey elements of exploration and simple puzzles.

What I appreciate most about Mr. Saitou is its creativity, which is driven by cute but thoroughly original character designs and clever writing. Even though most of the gameplay consists of simple conversation-based fetch quests, I never got tired of seeing what was around the next corner, and I always enjoyed talking with each new character.

The game’s humor sits comfortably at the intersection between wholesome and quirky, and the writing subtly references internet culture without relying too heavily on these allusions. The simple spatial puzzles are easy and engaging without feeling as if they were phoned in, and the thematic background music is lovely from start to finish.

I love almost everything about Mr. Saitou, but I should probably mention that there’s an unskippable musical cutscene featuring about three minutes of unremittingly flashing strobe lights toward the end. If you (like me) are photosensitive, this may be worth taking into consideration.

In addition, the sentimentality of the ending may ring hollow for players searching for a more nuanced or complicated story, especially regarding the extent of an individual’s personal responsibility for ensuring their quality of life under late-stage capitalism. This is a valid criticism, of course, but Mr. Saitou is a game about a llamaworm and a talking flower having magical underground adventures. All things considered, I think it’s probably best to enjoy the game for what it is.

Mr. Saitou is a sweet but still surprising game that’s entertaining to read and engaging to play, and I feel that its story earns the right to state its final message clearly: The world is filled with interesting people and beautiful places, and there’s more to life than slowly killing yourself for your job. Good health is a blessing, so you might as well make the most of your time on this earth while you’re still young.

Deepwell

~ Kathryn ~ Leave a comment

Deepwell is an Undertale-style narrative adventure game that takes about two hours to finish. You play as a blank slate character called “the Cartographer” who has recently arrived in the small forest town of Deepwell, which clings to the southern rim of a massive hole in the ground. Oddly enough, anyone who descends into the hole beyond a certain point gets “blipped,” meaning that they appear at the top of the hole as if nothing had happened. Generations of mystery hunters have sought the solution to this puzzle, but perhaps you might be the one to finally figure it out.

Deepwell is only about two dozen screens large, and there are five main characters to talk to. Most of the game involves engaging in long and meandering conversations with these characters in order to learn their stories. Sokolov manages the town library, and Evan runs the general store. Pierre has created something resembling an art gallery on one side of town, while Lily lives in a field of flowers on the other. At the intersection next to the highway, a robot named Bing helpfully provides information to visitors.  

It stands to reason that everyone living in such an isolated town would be a little weird. Aside from Bing, who is essentially a tutorial robot, each character is a self-contained short story that gradually unfolds as you talk with them. Thankfully, there are no wrong conversation choices, nor is there any missable content. The player is free to walk where they like and talk with the characters as they wish while unlocking a few extra conversation topics by interacting with each character’s environment.

On the eastern edge of town is a waterfall that hides a secret cave. Glyphs drawn onto the wall of this cave indicate whether a character’s dialogue has been exhausted. Once the Cartographer has sufficiently spoken with each of the town’s residents, a new path will open deeper into the forest to reveal a sixth character, who tempts the player with the possibility of an alternate (and much darker) ending.  

You can actually end the game any time you want by simply heading back to the highway and leaving town. You can also choose to wrap up the story at any point by taking a boat across the lake to see what’s on the north side of the giant hole. Although you’re given a choice in the final section of the game that affects the ending, I think Deepwell ties up its thematic threads quite nicely. This is a story about personal purpose and fulfillment, and about why we need art and mystery. How you approach these themes within the context of the game is up to you.

The graphics are primitive yet charming. I was put off by the crunchiness at first, but the lo-fi aesthetic grew on me. Deepwell contains a surprising number of insert illustrations and cutscenes, some of which are extremely well done. This is especially the case with Pierre, whose gallery of art installations closes with a remarkable set piece. I get the feeling that some players may find Pierre pretentious, but I appreciate his sincerity. And he’s not wrong about how visual glossiness is often a disguise for mediocrity. 

Deepwell is akin to a short story anthology that’s easy to pick up for twenty minutes at a time, but I ended up being so fascinated by the overarching narrative that I played the whole game in one sitting. The writing is exceptionally good. It gives me immense joy to know that something like Deepwell exists in the world, and I honestly feel that I’m a better person for having spent time with it.

Deepwell is free to play on Steam here:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2803660/Deepwell/

Sidequest Article on A Link Between Worlds

~ Kathryn ~ Leave a comment

I had the pleasure of writing a fun article for Sidequest about how A Link Between Worlds is a perfect cozy horror game to play during the long summer evenings. It’s a dark twist on Legend of Zelda series traditions and one of my favorite adventure games.

If you’re interested, the article is here:
https://sidequest.zone/2024/08/05/spooky-zelda-game/

Many kudos to the magical LunarChibistry for creating the lovely artwork of Princess Hilda in the promo graphic!

Games like Echoes of Wisdom

~ Kathryn ~ Leave a comment

Are you excited about Echoes of Wisdom and can’t wait to play it? Thankfully, there’s a wealth of excellent Zelda-style games with female and nonbinary protagonists made by small studios that you can jump into right now on Nintendo Switch. These are eight of my favorites…

Do you wish Zelda got to fight with a sword?
Check out: Ocean’s Heart

Are you nostalgic for the gameplay and dungeons of A Link to the Past?
Check out: Blossom Tales: The Sleeping King

Are you hungry for more rock-tossing action?
Check out: Lila’s Sky Ark

Are you looking for cute graphics and a nonbinary protagonist?
Check out: Frogsong

Would you like a simple and easy game to share with kids?
Check out: Arietta of Spirits

Would you like a challenging game with accessibility options?
Check out: Tunic

Do you prefer the game to be super difficult and have deep lore?
Check out: Hyper Light Drifter

Do you want your female character to wield both a sword and magic, and will you be satisfied with nothing less than complex and multilayered combat in an exploration-rich dark fantasy world that hides a tragic story about the suffering implicit in the rise and fall of empires? 
Check out, unironically: Dark Souls

When the Moon Didn’t Fall

~ Kathryn ~ Leave a comment

All the clocks in Clock Town have stopped working, and letters have stopped arriving from the Gerudo in the Great Bay. Both the clock master’s daughter and the swamp witches’ son sense that something is amiss. Slowly they come to understand one another while their world gradually winds itself apart.

When the Moon Didn’t Fall is a short novella that imagines what Zelda and Ganon would look like in the world of Majora’s Mask. According to the Legend of Zelda Encyclopedia, Termina only exists as a dream inside Link’s mind, and it’s interesting to analyze how the events and characters of Majora’s Mask reflect the trauma that Link experienced in Ocarina of Time. I therefore wanted to use Termina as a stage to explore the trauma of Zelda and Ganon, specifically within the context of a dream that’s rapidly fading.

I think it’s fair to admit that I was strongly inspired by Stephen King’s 1990 novella “The Langoliers,” which is a disturbing bit of speculation concerning what happens to the world of the past after the present has already moved on. I tried to capture a similar sense of time (literally) running out, a theme that felt appropriate to the anxiety-inducing atmosphere of Majora’s Mask. Like “The Langoliers,” When the Moon Didn’t Fall has elements of uncanniness and horror, but it’s also about forgiveness, healing, and hope for the future.

I originally wrote this story back in 2018, but it still holds a special place in my heart. I completed a substantial set of edits so that I could include one of the early chapters in my portfolio of writing samples for The Whispers of Hyrule, an upcoming Legend of Zelda fanzine celebrating Hyrule’s forests. I love the swamp forest bordering the open plains of Majora’s Mask, and I enjoyed revisiting the strange green spaces of Termina through this fic.  

You can read the full story on AO3 here:
https://archiveofourown.org/works/14093202/

The story illustration was created by the dangerously talented Thali, whose cool and creepy video game art can be found on Twitter (here), on Instagram (here), and on Tumblr (here).

Evil Gardening with Ganondorf

~ Kathryn ~ Leave a comment

I always seem to find myself in a Wind Waker mood during summer. One of the many things I love about The Wind Waker is how beautiful and green and breezy it is. It’s a joy to spend time in the world of the game, which is filled with all sorts of strange and interesting creatures.

To me, then, it’s always been amusing that the Deku Tree in the Forest Haven blames this state of affairs on Ganondorf. I believe the implication is supposed to be that Ganondorf is so innately evil that his very presence on the Great Sea causes monsters to appear, but that’s extremely silly. Ganondorf may be up to no good, but he’s just a crabby old man.

If Ganondorf is responsible for the appearance of plant monsters, I prefer to think that this is because one of his many old man hobbies is gardening. Evil gardening!!

This comic was drawn by the darkly brilliant Frankiesbugs, whose cute and creepy illustrations and comics can be found on Tumblr (here), on Instagram (here), on Cara (here), and on Redbubble (here). Frankiesbugs is also responsible for the comic art and environment design featured in an upcoming beat-em-up game called V’s Rage. Like Wind Waker, V’s Rage boasts plenty of cute creatures, beautiful sun-soaked landscapes, and ridiculous middle-aged men. You can check out the game and play a substantial free demo on Steam (here).

Tales of the Black Forest

~ Kathryn ~ Leave a comment

Tales of the Black Forest
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1093910/Tales_of_the_Black_Forest/

Tales of the Black Forest is a 16-bit RPG Maker narrative adventure game whose tone is split evenly between wholesome cuteness and graphic horror. Although Tales of the Black Forest features a dozen simple puzzles, a few short chase sequences, and limited elements of exploration, it might be more accurate to call it a visual novel instead of a classic adventure game. Tales of the Black Forest takes about three and a half hours to play, and more than half of this time is spent reading character dialog as you progress through a linear story.

The game’s story follows a high school student named Kihara Kashin who wakes up on a bench outside an abandoned train station. Kihara has somehow been transported to a depopulated town called Kuromori (whose name means “black forest”), where she used to live as a child before her mother died in a car accident. Inside the derelict station, Kihara meets a mysterious shape-shifting woman named Kiritani Yuki, who tells her that she has been trapped in the ruins of Kuromori by a curse. The only way to escape Kuromori is to use Nensha, a magical power that allows Kihara to travel back in time by touching retro electronic devices. By going back to the 1990s with Kiritani as her guide, Kihara can learn the origin of the curse and hopefully break it. 

The overall story arc of Tales of the Black Forest admittedly doesn’t make much sense. Thankfully, the game is split into three distinct chapters, each of which showcases the stand-alone character story of a cute yōkai girl while allowing the player to explore her environment. Each of the three chapters also explores the intersection between an urban legend and a social issue of the 1990s.

The first chapter is about a deserted village, Shiranaki (a play on the urban legend of Inunaki Village), and rural depopulation. The second chapter is about a magical ghost train and a fictional version of the Aum Shinrikyō “new religious movement” that carried out the Tokyo Subway Sarin Gas Attacks in March 1995. The third chapter is about a haunted movie theater that serves as a case study for how many small businesses that thrived during the postwar Shōwa era were forced to close during the prolonged economic recession of the 1990s.

Along with urban legends and social issues, Tales of the Black Forest is strongly inspired by the movies of Studio Ghibli, and its magical world is filled with quirky yōkai and gentle kami. The character illustrations of cute girls that accompany the dialog text are somewhat generic, but the game’s developers clearly put a great deal of love and attention into the 16-bit character sprites and their environments. There’s not a single part of this game that doesn’t make a gorgeous screenshot.

Alongside its whimsy and beauty, however, Tales of the Black Forest contains serious and sometimes graphically violent scenarios with disturbing themes and imagery. The overall tone of the game’s story emphasizes character drama more than horror, but the gruesome and upsetting elements are still there. You’ll be talking to adorable cats in the beautiful green yard of a forest café, and fifteen minutes later you’ll be watching a young woman beaten to death by a deranged cultist.

This mix of wholesome and horror worked for me, but both tonal aspects of the story are equally prominent. Accordingly, I wouldn’t recommend Black Forest to anyone who can’t sit through the creepier moments of The Ring, nor would I recommend it to anyone who can’t tolerate the more sentimental moments of My Neighbor Totoro.

Tales of the Black Forest was made by a Chinese studio in an obvious homage to Japanese popular culture, and its story occasionally feels like an attempt to filter a lecture from an “Introduction to Contemporary Japanese Society” university course through the medium of fiction. I personally found the references to Japanese social problems of the 1990s to be interesting and well-intentioned, but I could understand that some players might find these elements of the story a bit cringe in the way that early 2000s “onigiri means rice ball desu” North American anime fandom was a bit cringe.

Tales of the Black Forest was originally written in Chinese, and the English translation feels as though it was created by someone without much experience in localization. It’s serviceable, but it can be awkward at times. I tend to think the concept of “standard English” is nonsense, and I found the translation to be charming, especially because it reminded me of how pirated anime used to have English subtitles created by people whose first language was Chinese. In keeping with the retro theme of the game, I very much appreciated this unintentional element of nostalgia.

Tales of the Black Forest isn’t perfect, but it’s a solid 7/10 game that’s elevated to an 8/10 by virtue of the love and care that the two-person development team put into every aspect of its creation. This game caters to Japanese pop culture nerds who are fans of both cute anime characters and creepy urban legends, and I’m surprised it hasn’t attracted more attention since it was released on Steam in 2019. Tales of the Black Forest is a small but shining hidden treasure.

Neko Can Dream Review on Sidequest

~ Kathryn ~ Leave a comment

I’m excited to have published a review of the indie narrative adventure game Neko Can Dream on Sidequest. Neko Can Dream was created by the Japanese yuri manga artist Nekobungi Sumire, who captures a complex and beautiful world inside the simple Game Boy graphics.

Here’s an excerpt from my review:

Neko Can Dream will take most players about two and a half hours to finish. Even though the narrative tone is gentle, the pace is quite brisk, and the excellent game design ensures that the player never becomes lost or confused. Certain elements of the individual character stories will resonate strongly with players interested in themes relating to queer identity; however, at its core, Neko Can Dream is about how the dream worlds of video games can help people at all stages of life recover from trauma and reach out for connection.

If you’re interested, you can read the full review on Sidequest here:
https://sidequest.zone/2024/05/27/neko-can-dream-bittersweet-nostalgic-treat/